Oresteia, Trafalgar Studios, review: 'luminously interpreted'

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A child’s life is sacrificed; the impassive gaze of the camera records the lifeless body; the tide of history changes. The starting-point for Robert Icke’s humane and reflective adaptation of the Oresteia is not as remote from our own time as we might have imagined, or hoped.

As the refugee crisis continues to dominate headlines, Icke’s searching account of Aeschylus’s trilogy of tragedies, transferred to the West End after a sell-out season at the Almeida, finds a poignant contemporary resonance in the ancient narratives of retribution, justice and the intolerable responsibilities of power. The drama is framed by a series of exchanges between Orestes (Luke Thompson) and a doctor (Lorna Brown), who attempts to piece together his account of the catastrophe that has befallen his family: his sister, Iphigenia, killed by his father, Agamemnon; Agamemnon murdered by his wife, Klytemnestra; Orestes’s own killing of Klytemnestra and her lover.

We have become accustomed to the way in which modern media coverage blurs the boundaries between politicians’ public and private lives. Here Agamemnon (Angus Wright), a figure of desolate authority, answers a journalist’s intrusive questions, watched by Klytemnestra (Lia Williams) and his two younger children, Iphigenia and Orestes, before presiding over a family dinner at which Electra – reimagined as a moody teenager played by Jessica Brown Findlay – reluctantly joins them.

Icke’s restrained direction juxtaposes the touching banalities of domestic life – Iphigenia’s toy rabbit, Orestes’ childish nightmares, a splash of red wine on a white tablecloth – with a sense of contained foreboding from which moments of appalling violence bloom. Video clips of live interviews with Agamemnon preparing to go to war, and Klytemnestra awaiting his return from a victory whose price was their daughter’s life, are shown jarringly out of sync with the actors’ delivery, emphasising the caesura between public persona and private misery.

Hildegard Bechtler’s monochrome, rectilinear design incorporates a screen on which the spectators occasionally see their own reflections disconcertingly mingled with those of the actors. The significance of the device becomes evident in the final act, when Orestes is put on trial and we are obliged to judge his actions.

The play’s poster draws a bizarre comparison with The Godfather and Breaking Bad, but the production has no need of such borrowed glitter. The complex third-act resolution inevitably slows the pace of this 210-minute epic but the tragedy is luminously interpreted by the cast, with central performances of captivating precision from Wright and Williams, and Cleopatra Dickens infinitely touching as the first-night Iphigenia.